Symitar Invites Client CUs to 'the Mountain’

The 700 credit unions running on the Symitar platform are now being offered a hosted disaster recovery and business continuity service from a center buried 175 feet under a Missouri town and nicknamed "the Mountain.”

The Hosted Failover service is a new addition to the in-house Failover service already offered by the Jack Henry & Associates subsidiary and is operated from a hardened site in a secure, underground facility in Branson, Mo.

Typical “warm recovery” services can take as long as 48 hours to get a system up and running, the company said, while the hosted service can get a credit union back online in as little as 20 minutes.

“Failover is a valuable and proven product, but deploying it in-house requires the purchase and maintenance of expensive hardware components. In contrast, Hosted Failover provides the same robust features as the traditional offering but as a convenient, cost-effective, pay-as-you-go service," said Doug Childress, general manager of Jack Henry Associates' Retail Delivery group, which includes the Centurion business continuity and disaster recovery operation that co-developed the new service with San Diego-based Symitar.

The center is configured to support Symitar’s existing OutLink sites and services in case of service interruptions and itself is 175 feet underground, protecting it from natural disasters.

Greg Hopp, director of technology at the $357 million BMI FCU in Dublin, Ohio, an early adopter of Hosted Failover, said, "There is always a security risk when having a courier transport tapes to another branch. And even if the data backup was held in a different branch, a regional disaster could remove both data centers.”